


Something To Live For

by eucatastrophe__x



Category: The Hobbit RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Assisted Suicide, Depression, Drug Use, Honest, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Major Character Injury, Non-Graphic Violence, Suicide Attempt, it kind of is, there is some fluff though, this makes it sound so grim, whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 06:42:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4169877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eucatastrophe__x/pseuds/eucatastrophe__x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Lee had ever wanted was a way out.</p>
<p>
  <i>“You’re not going to get there, you know, no matter how hard you try – not yet.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“What do you mean?” he whispered. That was the thing about people who held themselves out as being mystical – anything that came out of their mouths was generic enough to apply to anyone. But he couldn’t help but ask for clarification – just in case.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“You’ll not be able to die until you’ve found something to live for.”</i>
</p>
<p>But that turned out to be just as unattainable – until, one day, it wasn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something To Live For

Lee was fourteen years old the first time he tried to kill himself.

Needless to say, it was not a success.

The drugs he was able to source for an overdose were pathetically limited – being a tall, dorky schoolkid was not exactly conducive to scoring anything particularly strong, not least in such a small town. Instead, he was limited to the antidepressants he’d been stockpiling (hiding them in his cheek as his mother stood over him every morning), a few boxes of supermarket-strength painkillers, and the bottle of disgusting spirits he’d sourced from the liquor cabinet when his parents weren’t looking.

He felt nothing.

The only side effect was mild drunkenness – which was problematic in its own right, since it loosened his tongue, and he found himself confessing to his mother what he’d done. She’d driven him up to the hospital, where they’d admitted him to the children’s ward (god, the mortification) and forced as much liquid charcoal as they could down his throat before he started to vomit.

He hadn’t even done a good enough job to need his stomach pumped.

Multiple blood tests (the crooks of his elbows were black and bruised from the enthusiastic needle activity) and a round with the on-call counsellor later, they concluded that he was fine – questioning whether he was, in fact, even depressed at all.

That didn’t even dignify a response.

He couldn’t remember when it had begun, the sucking black hopelessness that flooded his mind and body almost every waking moment (and most of his sleeping moments, too, but he hadn’t told anyone about the borderline psychotic dreams that his brain subjected him to every night, only letting him wake up in time to clap a hand over his mouth to prevent himself from screaming out loud).

Even at fourteen, he’d known that he didn’t have a future. The thought of living into adulthood – hell, even reaching his late teens – seemed horrifying and impossible. The drugs that his doctor had started pumping him full of the year before didn’t even put a dent in his misery, a conclusion he’d promptly reached after the first six week test run. That was about the time he’d stopped taking them, in the vague hope that they’d be useful as something to overdose on.

He’d seen suicide, somewhat optimistically, as the glorious reprieve, the way to escape – but he couldn’t even get that right.

In one of his more confident moments during the weeks that followed, lying awake at three in the morning as the rest of the household slept, he decided that it wasn’t so bad that his first attempt had failed. At least he knew what not to do the next time.

If he was going to succeed, he was going to need to get decidedly more inventive.

The problem was that fate was not on his side.

He spent the next decade discovering as much when each and every further attempt was scuppered – sometimes by something infuriatingly beyond his control, and sometimes not.

He stopped eating and drinking entirely, only to pass out at school and come to in the hospital, an IV pumping nutrients into him and a kindly suggestion to his parents that they look into treatments for what was clearly an eating disorder.

He slit his wrists in the bath (something he’d heard about keeping his body temperature at a certain level so that the blood just kept flowing and didn’t clot) and the water was turning a satisfying dark pink when his father – who was meant to be at work for another two hours – burst in with a yell and heaved him out: a slick, bloody and broken mess on the floor while he called for an ambulance.

It was around that time (age sixteen or seventeen, conveniently still a minor in the eyes of the law) that his parents had had him committed, sending him to a faraway hospital for the summer when his friends were taking road trips and camping on beaches and staying up all night and celebrating how wonderful life was. He spent two months being monitored 24/7 – not that there was much for them to monitor, considering that he spent most of the time staring at the wall and obediently taking his medication and _planning._

He left with renewed vigour – not for life, as his parents had so desperately hoped, but quite the opposite.

He went driving in the country, finding the longest open road and testing just how fast he could get his car to go before veering it sharply off the road and into a tree. The car crumpled like an accordion but – damn it, he’d taken it to the mechanic the previous week and they must have replaced the airbags that he’d purposely removed (at least that explained why the bill had been so high), because they exploded in front of him.

Perhaps more enraging was the way that a passing car (Christ, and he’d picked this road because it was meant to be _quiet_ ) stopped and the driver ran over and wrenched the door open and pulled him out of his seat before the car ignited.

He jumped off a roof, and ended up with two broken legs, a concussion, and a disbelieving team of doctors and nurses treating him in the ER.

On more than one occasion, after moving to the city, he had taken enough Class As to fell an elephant, but without fail he would wake in his own bed the next day with nothing but a powerful thirst and a black cloud hovering over him that was almost tangible.

And he aged, and the fog persisted – the never-ending despair that prevented him from doing anything much with his life, other than wishing it would end.

It was his mother’s idea for him to go and visit Mad Melinda (not that that was her real name – just the one whispered by the local kids when they spotted her roaming the streets) when he was visiting from the city for the long weekend. Melinda was a great one for crystals and horoscopes and tarot cards and all that shit that Lee had no time for. The only thing she could tell him that he’d be interested in would be a foolproof suicide method. Unfortunately, somehow she and her mother had become (the most unlikely of) friends.

“She’s just come back from a retreat, and I was collecting her mail while she was away,” his mother had insisted, pressing a bundle of envelopes into his hands (for the town lunatic, she sure got a lot of letters). He decided not to ask what the retreat was for – or if it was code for an involuntary committal.

“She’s not mad, Lee,” she’d added, “just – I mean, it’s four o’clock, so she might have had a bit to drink. You don’t have to stay and be polite if she’s drunk.”

“Gee, thanks,” he muttered, but he took the mail anyway.

The front door was wide open, and Lee had to duck to avoid the dozens of crystals hanging from the veranda awning. Sure enough, Melinda was in her rocking chair in the front room, theoretically savouring the last sunshine of the winter afternoon – though he wasn’t sure if she was registering anything, based on the very full glass perched precariously on the arm of her chair and the largely empty bottle of spirits (on closer inspection, it looked like cooking sherry) on the table.

“Ma – Melinda? I’m Lee – Margaret’s son. She asked me to drop off your mail.”

Her eyes were half open, but not focused on him. He wasn’t even sure she was awake until she spoke.

“Get your black aura off my property, boy.”

“Sorry?” he stuttered, taking a step back. Her voice had a strange lilt to it – one which he was fairly sure he hadn’t heard before, even when she was rambling around town shouting nonsensically at anyone who’d listen.

She didn’t move or open her eyes further.

“You’re not going to get there, you know, no matter how hard you try – not yet.”

“What do you mean?” he whispered. That was the thing about people who held themselves out as being mystical – anything that came out of their mouths was generic enough to apply to anyone. But he couldn’t help but ask for clarification – just in case.

“You’ll not be able to die until you’ve found something to live for.”

He stumbled backwards into the doorframe, all but running back to the car (this time, he forgot to duck, and got a faceful of crystals for his troubles).

Maybe his mother had told her – but that seemed unlikely, given the intense stigma associated with having a suicidal child in this godforsaken town. Sure enough, when he asked her, she looked appalled. His confusion was only compounded the next morning when Melinda rang, asking where her mail was. Apparently, she had no recollection of his visit. What’s more, when Lee had answered the phone, the voice at the other end was the one he remembered from his childhood, not the one he’d heard yesterday.

Was it possible that, despite probably being clinically insane (and possibly extremely intoxicated at the time), Mad Melinda was actually onto something? That maybe there was a reason why he’d been failing in his attempts on his own life for so many years?

He didn’t tell anyone about what she’d said, but contemplated it the whole way home.

Find something to live for.

Well, he had his girlfriend – at least, the girl he’d been banging on the regular – surely she counted?

When he got back, he went straight to her place, and straight into her bed. He lost count of the number of times she came, and in the end she practically passed out from overexertion, a sated smile on her face. She seemed to like him enough: kept asking him to go on dates with her, was always really happy when he stayed overnight, said (well, screamed, usually) that she loved him – wasn’t that enough?

It had to be enough.

But there was only one way to find out.

He left as soon as she was asleep, calling his friendly dealer as he stepped out into the night, asking if he could get some meth. The dealer had asked how much he wanted (“A point? Two?”) and the silence when he responded that he needed an ounce – _right away_ – dragged on so long that he wondered if the call had disconnected. He’d never presented as a particularly heavy drug user, after all. He couldn’t blame the man for being surprised.

“You know how much that’s gonna cost you, yeah? Extra for the rush job, too.”

“Have I ever not delivered on the cash?”

“Guess not,” he acknowledged, “big night tonight?”

“If all goes to plan.”

The baggie and a handful of new syringes tucked into his coat pocket, he headed for one of the seedier clubs he’d discovered, where drug use was as routine as breathing. He’d doled out shares of the innocuous-looking powder to complete strangers like a benevolent druggie Santa Claus after one of the bartenders agreed that they could use the kitchen out back to get it ready, but saved half of it for himself. They crowded him in disbelief as he injected every vein he could find easily (hating how practised he was becoming at this), eyes wide and faces skeletal and all deliriously high.

“Dude, you’re going to kill yourself.”

He just gave a tight little smile in response.

That was the last memory he had of that night.

But sure enough – like every other fucking time, he thought with a loud groan – he woke up the next day in a derelict doorway on the other side of the city from the club, feeling like death but _not actually dead._

It was official. He was a failure. He was never going to make it.

Something solidified in his chest that day, and he carried it around for the next several years – a cold, hard, bitter nugget of despair: the knowledge that no matter how much he wanted to die, he couldn’t.

As he grew older still, he grew more reckless. No speed was too fast, no height too high, no liquor too strong. His reckless behaviour cost him friends, girlfriends – and later, after a particularly eye-opening night at a club when he acknowledged which gender he was really attracted to – boyfriends. He didn’t intentionally attempt suicide, because that would be futile, but jumped at the chance to partake in any activity for which death was a possible side effect. 

He became impulsive.

It was that impulsiveness that made him intervene when he saw a group of five men harassing another in a dingy alley near Andre’s, another of the many bars he frequented, one chilly winter evening a few weeks before his twenty-eighth birthday.

They had the man pressed right up against the wall, standing around him in a confining semicircle, and even from a distance Lee could hear that the tone of their conversation (if he could call it that) was less than pleasant.

And he’d had a crap day, after all – his boss had been completely unreasonable and shouted at him, the coffee cart across the road had sold out of the donuts he liked, and the power company was refusing to correct the error that had left him with a bill three times the usual amount. Plus, well, he was still alive.

So he stepped closer.

“Yeah – they all like that, don’t they? Fucking faggots.”

“He looks like he’d take it, I reckon.”

“– faggot in a cardigan.”

The words jumbled over each other, the men all slurring independently of each other and without any semblance of actual conversation, but one of them had what looked like an empty bottle in his hand and their victim’s arms were pinned between his back and the wall and it was abundantly clear to Lee where this was heading (both figuratively and literally).

“Hey,” he called, light and chatty, standing close enough to distract them but not so close that they’d see him as a threat, “what are you guys up to?”

“Homo’s going to get what’s coming to him,” one announced. He looked like the enforcer of the group – definitely the most muscular, and presumably the one who had got the poor man they were tormenting up against the wall in the first place.

“You know what they say about people who don’t like gays?” he asked, still conversational, and the five of them turned to him as one. He didn’t even know if their victim was gay, and wondered what he had done to get these idiots on his bad side. Then again, it was most likely that all he had done was _exist_ , regardless of his sexuality, and they’d seen him as easy pickings. He didn’t seem the type to fight back, not least because of his defeated expression – like he’d already accepted his fate.

“They say they act like they do because they’re secretly gay themselves.”

He couldn’t help but grin at the appalled looks on their faces – it was obviously the first time they’d ever had anyone raise the matter with them.

But appalled very quickly gave way, to be replaced by furious at Lee’s implied allegation. They advanced on him, the one holding the bottle now brandishing it like a weapon, and Lee sighed.

But – finally – he had their undivided attention. That as all he’d wanted the whole time.

Because now they’d lost interest in their original plan, and their original victim – who was staring at him in disbelief, apparently completely unable to understand what was going on.

“Go,” he practically snarled at the man, still pressed to the wall and looking like he wanted it to envelop him whole, “for fuck’s sake, run!”

And then, finally, he moved, practically tripping over his own feet in his haste.

And Lee was left staring down five very drunk, very angry men who had been deprived of their plaything.

He got a few good hits in, of course. One of the men had lost his front teeth and another’s nose had broken with a satisfying crunch, but in the end there were five of them and only one of him, and it didn’t end until the flashing lights of a police car illuminated the alley and they scarpered.

Lee rolled onto his back with a sigh (a bloody bubble escaping his lips with the movement) and looked up at the stars.

Even instigating a fight with a group of violent thugs wasn’t enough to get him over the line. If only one of them had had a gun.

He closed his eyes – only for a moment, since he could literally feel them swelling and purpling – but when he next came to, it appeared that much more time had passed than he had anticipated, because the alley was gone and his surroundings were entirely different.

Every inch of him ached.

But he was alive.

Oh, of course he was.

“Well, well. Look who’s returned to the land of the living,” the nurse sang cheerfully as he squinted at the harsh light, his eyes eventually focusing on her before moving to scan the sterile white of the hospital room. Her voice was slightly fuzzy, which Lee worried about for a second before realising that he had thick bandages wrapped around his head and covering his ears.

“You had us all worried for a while,” she continued, “so I’m glad to see you’ve got your eyes open. The doctor will be here in just a moment, but – your friend outside is very anxious to see you. He’ll be thrilled to know you’re awake.”

His friend?

He tried to ask who she was talking about, but he appeared to be incapable of opening his mouth.

“No, no, your jaw’s wired shut, don’t try to speak. I’ll go and get him, shall I? Blink twice for yes, once if you want to go back to sleep after the doctor sees you.”

He blinked once – even that movement sluggish – and hesitated for a second before repeating the action.

What could he say? He was curious.

And sure enough, after being poked and prodded by the doctor and communicating with him via blinks, the nurse reappeared, and –

It was him.

The man he’d saved.

The one who’d run away.

Clearly, he hadn’t run far enough.

He looked terrible – like he hadn’t slept in weeks. (Lee wondered, for a fleeting moment, how long he’d been out of it – three days was the current record.) His shirt was rumpled and his face was grey and unshaven but the relief emanating from him was so tangible that Lee could practically have reached out to touch it.

That was, assuming he could move.

Which he couldn’t.

“Hello, Lee,” the man said softly, taking the seat by his bedside, looking like he wanted to reach for Lee’s hand but then thinking better of it once he registered the cast covering his forearm.

“I’m so glad you’re okay.”

‘Okay’ was one way to put it, but – now there was a beautiful man at his bedside. And he was beautiful, once Lee looked past the anxious pallor of his skin, with a long nose and angular jaw and what looked like very soft hair and the most mesmerising blue eyes he had ever seen.

Suddenly, ‘okay’ didn’t even begin to cover it.

Oh, those _eyes._

Lee couldn’t help but stare.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?) the man misinterpreted his smitten gaze as overwhelmed confusion.

“I – oh! I’m Richard, by the way. Sorry, that was stupid of me. I know your name because the doctors kept saying it when you came in – they found your wallet in your pocket.”

A pause. Lee imagined the man’s name on his tongue, testing its weight, and wondered when he would be able to say it out loud – and if Richard would linger long enough to hear it.

“They told you what happened?” Richard checked, “blink once for no, twice for yes.” (The nurse had clearly explained their rudimentary communication system.)

Two blinks.

Lee knew.

“One wrist broken and the other sprained, broken ribs, dislocated jaw, a spot of internal bleeding that we’ve already taken care of, significant bruising to the face, chest, abdomen and thighs –”

The doctor had pulled up his gown impersonally, and he would have cringed had he not been so preoccupied with the Rorschach blots of bruises covering his torso. It was a personal best, even for him. He’d tuned out of the doctor’s litany at that point, the odd word registering (trauma, ER, brain) but not in a way that he could understand.

“But you’ll be fine,” he concluded. “That cast will stay on your wrist for a few weeks, and you’re going to be eating through a straw for a while, but the rest will go away on its own. No strenuous physical activity, mind. We’ll keep you here for a week or so, keep those pain meds coming, see how you go. Okay? Blink twice for okay.”

It was okay.

Of course it was okay.

He would have preferred to be stretched out in the morgue, but hey.

“I’ve taken some time off work,” Richard blurted, filling the silence that had stretched on as Lee reorganised his thoughts, eyes fixed on his feet poking up through the blankets at the end of the bed. “I, ah – I told them about what happened – that I was attacked, and the friend who defended me was in the hospital. They’ve been very understanding. So you won’t be getting rid of me for a while. That is – as long as you don’t mind me being here, of course. The nurses said they don’t have a next of kin on record, but if there’s someone you want them to call…?”

Lee blinked once.

“And… is it okay if I keep coming to visit you?”

Like Lee was going to respond with anything other than a yes (though it was difficult to be as emphatic as he wanted to be when he couldn’t actually speak).

Plus, his father had told him several years ago in no uncertain terms that he had to stop frightening his mother with the whole suicide thing, because it upset her and they didn’t appreciate it. (The funny thing was that they didn’t know the half of it, but he decided that he would keep that snippet to himself.) Lee wasn’t in such a bleak place that he couldn’t feel guilty at the message – it was just that the desire to die overwhelmed everything else. After that, he’d made sure that any references to his parents were removed from his medical files and that no trace of his activities ever made its way back to them.

“I just… I feel like I’m in your debt,” Richard mused, “like I owe you my life or something. So if there’s anything I can do for you… well, we can work out a way for you to tell me, I’m sure.”

Lee stayed quiet (like he could do anything else, really). Then again, that was probably a good thing – if he could talk, he was sure that some snarky comment would spill out: something about how he wasn’t trying to do Richard a favour, as such, by intervening, but was really just an opportunist at heart.

Richard would look appalled, and then he would get that look on his face (the look that people who hadn’t experienced depression or suicidal tendencies got when they were confronted with someone who had) and he would _pity_ Lee and he would walk out and never come back.

Yes, it was probably a good thing that he couldn’t speak.

On the second day, it rained. Richard was by his side as soon as visiting hours started, shaking the water out of his hair and draping his coat over the door to dry. The hours stretched out comfortably (at least, Lee was comfortable, though Richard probably would have got more interaction from his chair if he’d spoken to it instead), and Lee savoured the company.

_Richard’s_ company.

And every time Richard looked at him with that ever-present sparkle and curiosity, Lee felt the lump in his chest unfurl slightly, and he wondered – was this it? Was this what Mad Melinda had been talking about in that strange lilting snarl all those years ago?

No – surely not. After all, he’d been attracted to people on sight before, though those instances usually escalated in a matter of minutes to bodies pressed against the wall and hands inside jeans and hot messy kisses. He didn’t feel quite like that when he looked at Richard – but he couldn’t articulate exactly how he _did_ feel.

But he did know that he liked it.

In the afternoon, things took a turn for the sombre. It was like someone had flicked a switch. One moment, Richard was telling him stories (about his childhood, his job, his friends, his travel – anything and everything under the sun, and Lee absorbed it all greedily, especially since the bandages around his head had been changed so he could hear properly) and the next he had his head in his hands.

“God, I can’t understand you.”

There was nothing Lee could do but wait until he looked up again.

“You just – those men – you knew what they were going to do to me, and you didn’t seem to care if they did it to you instead. You saved me, and I – I can’t be responsible for your death.”

Lee just stared mutely back at him, a frown creasing his forehead for an instant before it smoothed away, leaving something more impassive in its wake.

It was clearly not the response Richard was expecting.

“Christ, why are you so blasé about this? Don’t you get it? You _died_. Your heart stopped. They had to shock you back to life. I didn’t – I saw – you _died_ , for god’s sake.”

Lee’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“They – oh. They didn’t tell you that part, did they?”

They hadn’t.

He had died.

Lee – he who couldn’t die – had died. He had got there, for Christ’s sake – finally got over the line, only to have release snatched back from him.

Mad Melinda’s words floated back yet again.

Something had clearly changed.

Without realising, Lee had apparently – god, after everything – found something to live for.

It couldn’t have been the project he’d been working on for as long as he could remember at work, the waitress at his local diner who hated it when he came in because of the gloom that he radiated, the guy he’d been casually involved with for the last few months but who didn’t really care about him as much as his abilities in the bedroom, or his parents who were constantly so appalled by him.

No, it appeared that that something was six foot three, dark-haired, blue-eyed, and anxious-faced – and as he reached forward to smooth Lee’s hair worriedly, he wondered if he was about to die all over again.

(Oh, it would be just like fate to bring someone like Richard into his life, let him fall for him so fast and helplessly, and then forcibly remove him from the land of the living like he’d wished for so many years.)

“I’m sorry,” Richard whispered, “I’ve made you panic. I shouldn’t have told you. You’ll be fine now. They don’t think – you’re fine. You’ll be fine.”

Well.

Maybe he would be.

For the first time since – shit, it had been at least a decade and a half – he let himself hope.

It was a good feeling.

On the third day, Richard brought an old mp3 player loaded with ebooks. “Thought I’d give you a break from listening to my rambling… I wasn’t sure what you liked to read, but you look like a thriller kind of guy to me,” he smiled hesitantly, “and this way you don’t have to focus on the pages – you can just lie there and listen.”

Lee blinked three times.

“…Does three blinks mean thank you?”

Two blinks.

“Well – you’re welcome. Here –” He tucked the earbuds into Lee’s ears gently, carefully, and the mp3 player into the palm of his good (well, better) hand. “Hopefully these will keep you going for a little while. I have to go into work today, but I’ll be back tonight.”

He paused again, clearly involved in some internal struggle, before his face cleared and (so quickly Lee wondered, for the rest of the day, whether he had dreamed it) he pressed a kiss to Lee’s forehead, gifted him with another small smile, and then disappeared.

Lee concluded that even if it had been his imagination, he was going to dwell on it happily.

On the fifth day, Richard brought a notepad.

“I was thinking – well. You’ve been using your good hand more, even if you haven’t realised, and I figured that this way we could maybe communicate a bit better… if you’re up to it, of course. Otherwise we can leave it for another day.”

Lee flexed the fingers of his right hand experimentally – yes, he could move them enough to hold a pen. Moving his head in a gentle and vague approximation of a nod, he let Richard curl his fingers around it and push the paper towards him hopefully.

And if Richard noticed the thick white scars criss-crossing his forearms, he didn’t say anything.

Lee frowned for a moment. What did he want their first proper communication to be?

In the end (and how fitting it was) he wrote the first thing that had come to his mind when he’d first looked at Richard – really looked at him.

As Richard read the message, a slow, lovely flush crawled over his cheeks and down his neck, disappearing into the collar of his shirt, and suddenly Lee wanted to laugh with happiness.

_You’ve got the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen._

“Thank you,” he murmured, “I, um… I would like to say the same, but yours are still a bit swollen over for me to make that call.”

Lee wheezed through his teeth (the closest sound to a laugh he could make) and Richard smiled shyly back at him.

He reached for the pen again.

_Can I take you out for dinner?_

He paused, adding another line.

_(Once I can walk and talk again – you wheeling me around and feeding me does not count.)_

Richard barked with laughter at his addition, but his blush still hadn’t quite disappeared.

“I’d like that. Just – one thing?”

Two blinks.

“Don’t take me to Andre’s.”

Lee wheezed out another laugh – bigger than the last, and much more painful.

“Oh – shit, I’m sorry, Lee. I didn’t mean to. Are you okay? Should I call a nurse? Oh, crap –”

He reached for Richard’s wrist, sucking in a sharp breath and feeling his heart stutter in his chest at the contact. Richard just stared at him, and he felt himself getting lost in those beautiful eyes again, and –

He blinked twice, slow and deliberate.

I’m okay.

“If you’re sure,” Richard said dubiously, relaxing in his chair and letting go of the call button, picking up the paper from the floor and passing it back when Lee wiggled his fingers expectantly.

_I feel like I have to go back – I sort of want to buy those men flowers._

He thought for a moment.

_No, a very generous bar tab. I think flowers might be a bit gay for them, and I'm sure they'd appreciate free booze more._

He was rapidly falling in love with the sound of Richard’s laugh.

And the fact that he voluntarily spent most of each day at Lee’s side, either telling him stories about his life or lapsing into the most comfortable silence Lee had ever experienced… well, it had him wondering.

No, that was a lie.

He didn’t have to wonder at all.

He knew.

Every time Richard looked at him, he knew.

So he added one last message to the page.

_The first thing I’m going to do when I can open my mouth properly again is kiss you._

The shy face and the blush were both back with a vengeance, but Richard didn’t hesitate before repeating his earlier words – 

“I’d like that.”

It was three more painfully long days before the doctor agreed that he could be unwired. He lay there, still and obedient, but heart thundering in his chest in a way it had never done before, keeping his eyes fixed on the ceiling as Richard hovered in the corner – and eventually, it was done.

“Do you want to have a go at talking? Gently,” the nurse added, “we don’t want to undo all your good work.”

There was really only one thing he wanted to say, his voice raspy from a lack of use, but he got the word out anyway.

“Richard.”

A wide smile split Richard’s face, and neither of them noticed the nurse sidling out of the room wearing her own smug expression, breaking into a run back to the nurses’ station to report the developments.

“Richard,” he repeated, loving the way it rolled off his tongue as the man in question pulled his chair right up to the bed, as close as it would go, and tentatively covered Lee’s hand with his own.

“God, you have a lovely voice,” he marvelled, “it’s so strange to hear you speak after all this time.”

“Good strange or bad strange?” Lee murmured back, still trying not to open his mouth too wide.

“Good strange. Very good strange.”

And Lee just smiled.

“Richard?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you remember what I said I was going to do when I could talk again?”

“I think I need reminding,” Richard whispered, leaning closer still and letting Lee reach for him, pressing his good hand to his cheek as he kissed him.

Oh, what a kiss.

Lee felt _life_ flood through his veins and he wanted to shout with joy. They were both hesitant – mostly – but Lee couldn’t help but whimper into Richard’s mouth as he sucked softly on his bottom lip, nudging it with the tip of his tongue once before pulling away.

“I think I could get used to this.”

“I think there’s nothing else I’d like more.”

Richard checked him out of hospital when he was finally allowed to leave, and drove him back to his place without asking, grinning at Lee’s confusion.

“This isn’t my apartment,” he said dumbly, and Richard’s smile grew.

“No, it’s mine.”

Lee’s friends (god, could he call them that? The people he lived with, shared rooms with but never really spoke to, not in the way he was already speaking to Richard) had barely noticed his absence and were largely indifferent when he reappeared, more than two weeks after he’d left, shouting behind him that he was going for a walk and a drink at Andre’s. It made an inexplicable amount of sense for him to tell them he was moving out, pack up his things one-handed (to be fair, Richard did the bulk of the work at his own insistence, while Lee directed lazily from the bed) and then unpack them again at his new abode – _their_ new abode.

And slowly but surely, everything seemed to click into place.

He woke every morning in a state of disbelief and – yes, it was happiness. Over time, the fire of misery that had been lodged in his chest for as long as he could remember had been dampened down to embers and then gone out entirely – so much so that he couldn’t quite believe he’d spent so long wishing he was dead in the first place.

Unbelievable.

He’d never chased this feeling, this euphoria, never thinking he was really capable of experiencing it – and yet here it was, intoxicating and overwhelming and suffocatingly good and god, Lee knew now that he could never go back to the way things had been before.

_Before_ was not a topic he discussed with Richard for a long time. His new boyfriend (and it hadn’t taken long for that label to attach – they were living together, after all) understood that there were parts of his life that he did not discuss, and he never prodded. There had been the odd worried look – especially at the beginning, and especially the first night he saw Lee naked, old scars rippling his skin – but he waited patiently.

And one bleak Sunday afternoon in October, curled into each other on the sofa as the rain lashed the windows, Lee told him everything.

He cried.

Richard cried.

The dog (the one they’d rescued from being put down, the one who’d looked up at them so dolefully that Richard had insisted on bringing him home and loving him) howled along with them.

“And… how about now? How do you feel now? When you think about… dying? Suicide? _Do_ you think about it?” Richard probed cautiously.

“I feel… I feel happy. I feel like I love you, more than anything, and I’ve found what was missing this whole time. You’ve given me something to live for, and I never want to lose you.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Richard smiled through his tears, “I’m not going anywhere – not without you.”

Richard kept his word.

They spent three glorious, technicolour decades together – more perfect than Lee had ever thought possible.

And then he got sick.

Lee had held his hand, squeezing hard enough to bruise, as the oncologist had showed them the scans (an ominous mass in the front of his brain, with no clearly delineated edges and shadowy tendrils curling outwards) and explained the prognosis: six months to a year with no treatment, a ten percent chance of recovery with a few months of savage chemotherapy, a two percent chance that they would get it all if they tried to operate.

Lee knew which option he would choose before they were all even on the table.

“I want to spend the rest of my life loving you, not fighting cancer,” Richard told him, smiling even though his eyes were bright with unshed tears (and god, the light in those eyes, so vibrant, like it would never go out except now it suddenly _could_ –)

“I know,” he breathed, linking his fingers with Richard’s, “and I will do everything in my power to make the rest of our time together perfect.”

Richard interpreted the comment as referring to the rest of their relationship – but that wasn’t exactly what Lee had meant.

He understood, now, that this was his time as well – after all these years, it had finally arrived.

The drive home was quiet, both of them lost in their thoughts. Lee made Richard’s favourite dinner, and once their plates had been scraped clean and they were tangled together on the couch with the remnants of their glasses of wine, he came out with it.

“I’m going with you.”

Richard frowned in confusion. “Going where?”

“You know where.”

It was a few seconds before it clicked into place.

“You – what? No. Absolutely not.”

Lee didn’t respond, so Richard clarified. There was a strange tinge to his tone – almost desperation, like he was hoping he’d misunderstood what Lee was implying.

“You will _not_ kill yourself.”

But it turned out that he had understood perfectly.

“Why not? You are.”

“That’s different, and you know it.”

“It’s not different at all. You know what I was like before I met you. I can’t live without you, Richard.” His eyes filled with unexpected tears and he dashed them away crossly as Richard sat up, taking his hands and looking at him earnestly.

“Don’t you remember what I said at the hospital? I can’t be responsible for your death.”

“And I’ve told you a thousand times since then – you’re responsible for my _life_.”

The thought of that life continuing without Richard in it was the most agonising prospect he’d ever faced.

Their parents were dead, their siblings were dead, and while they’d had a succession of dogs after the first, it was just the two of them now.

It would always be just the two of them – now and forever after.

That was how it was supposed to be.

So he set his jaw mutinously, and prepared to wait.

It took a few weeks, but eventually, Richard came around – just like Lee knew he would.

“How?” he asked one day, out of the blue, appearing in the bathroom while Lee was on his knees in the shower and scrubbing the tiles.

“Hmm?” He looked up, brush in hand, and Richard repeated himself and without any further context he realised, in a heady rush, what he meant.

“I can get something – some pills.”

An old friend from his reckless youth who he’d kept in touch with, who promised every time they caught up that he would see Lee right if he was ever in need of anything illicit. In fact, Lee had already made some preliminary enquiries, and had been told that he only needed to say the word. (He couldn’t doubt the authenticity of whatever was handed over – not when he’d stepped into a precarious situation and talked down the police until his friend escaped with a formal warning instead of jail time.)

“I see.” Richard chewed on his lip thoughtfully, and Lee knew it was as good as done.

It was another week before Richard brought it up again – somehow simultaneously blunt and tentative as they were unpacking the groceries. Leaving the tins and packets on the counter, Lee tugged him towards the couch, and together they nutted out the details.

“You’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he commented softly into Lee’s shoulder.

“It’s all I can think about.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Lee checked, not entirely sure what he meant until he looked back up with the smile that never failed to turn his knees to jelly, even after all these years.

“If it’s what you want, it’s what I want too.”

Over the next three months, they boxed up their lives, organised their finances and updated their wills. They took one last holiday together, flying from favourite city to favourite city and reliving all the memories they’d made the first (and second, and third) time around. It had been Richard’s idea to travel first class – after all, money wasn’t going to be much use to them soon – and it was worth it to stretch out together, sipping champagne and pretending to be much more important than they were.

They held one final dinner party for the friends that remained: such parties had become legendary, over the years, for Lee’s cooking as much as Richard’s charming hosting (and the way that they smiled goofily at each other, Richard letting Lee bend him backwards dramatically and kiss him despite their company, unintentionally setting aspirations for everyone who had ever sat around their dining table: _one day, I will have a love like that._ )

This dinner party was no different – not until the very end.

Because over the cheese board and the last remnants of the wine, once everyone was leaning back and groaning from how full Lee had stuffed them, the pair told them of their plans.

While there were a few tears around the table, no one tried to talk them out of it. That didn’t come as a surprise.

“When?”

“Soon.”

A week after that, Lee returned home triumphant.

“Look what I’ve got.”

He held up the small plastic bottle, shaking it so Richard could hear its contents rattling around. When he tipped them into his hand, they looked like they could have been painkillers – small and innocuous and certainly not capable of ending two lives without a second thought.

“He said we’ll get drowsy – it takes about half an hour, less on an empty stomach – and eventually fall asleep, and then… well, you know.”

Richard lifted his free hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to his knuckles before looking back up at him with such devotion it almost made his knees buckle.

“Thank you.”

“You don’t want to… go anywhere?” Lee asked, for what was probably the hundredth time. But Richard just shook his head. His answer stayed the same, as it had every time Lee asked about logistics. “No, I just want to be at home – in our home, with you.”

Lee threw away the bottle, of course – no doubt it had his friend’s fingerprints on it, and even if it didn’t, the risk that it could be traced back to him was not one that Lee was willing to take. Instead, it went out with the trash weeks before the main event, so that by the time anyone started asking questions, all the evidence would be long gone.

“Just say the word when you’re ready.”

The diagnosis had come in late spring, and when summer was just starting to creep into autumn, Richard finally came to him.

“I think it’s nearly time.”

Lee just nodded.

He wasn’t nervous, or scared.

To be honest, he was more scared of waiting.

The tumour had spread, wrapping around the optic nerve of Richard’s right eye. He was losing his sight steadily, and Lee couldn’t bear the thought of those eyes staring back at him, glassy and unseeing – even after all this time, they were still his favourite feature.

Richard was also having trouble with his hand – his dominant hand, which made it so much more frustrating. Lee had taken to writing on his behalf, and he could do a pretty good forgery of his signature, but there had been more than one occasion when he’d come home to find a broken dish or glass on the kitchen floor that had slipped out of Richard’s hand when he’d tried to pick it up without thinking.

And the headaches – _Christ,_ the headaches. Listening to Richard whimper in pain – and knowing that there was nothing he could do to ease it, bar rocking him back and forth and murmuring that it would pass eventually, and he would be okay – broke his heart every single time.

But Lee knew it could have been a thousand times worse: he’d done a lot of reading after the diagnosis, and he knew how things were going to pan out. The Richard he knew would disappear, to be replaced by a person who looked and sounded and felt like Richard but who didn’t laugh at his corny jokes or want to dance around the kitchen while they cooked or prefer to sleep curled against each other wearing nothing but fuzzy socks or hum obnoxiously as he shaved or give Lee that gooey smile every time he told him he loved him.

That day was coming.

Lee did not want to experience it.

And if Richard was ready, he was ready too.

They spent their last day doing all their favourite things. It started slowly, both of them dozing until mid-morning, Richard’s head on Lee’s chest and their arms wrapped around each other as they whispered sporadically.

Before facing the world, they had a long soak in the large tub they’d had specially installed, that fit both of them comfortably – Richard had poured in a whole bottle of bubble bath with a devilish smile and for the first ten minutes, Lee could barely see the top of his head through the foamy wall that had risen up between them.

They ate lunch at their favourite restaurant (and left a thousand dollar tip for the waitress they always requested), Richard letting Lee lean close and feed him with a grin on his face every so often. The meal was followed by ice creams from the local gelataria, which they ate as they walked, Lee pointing things out along the way and Richard squinting one eye closed in an attempt to focus.

And all of these activities were interspersed with lovemaking that alternated between frantic and desperate and careful and slow, as they did their best to memorise every touch and kiss and moan.

But eventually, the day – as days do – came to an end.

“Time for bed?” Richard asked with a shaky whisper, closing his eyes as Lee cupped his face in his hands earnestly.

“We don’t have to do this – not today, not ever, if you don’t want to.”

They’d set up an elaborate system with their friends – every morning, Richard or Lee would send them all a message to reassure them that they were still around. The message had to be followed by a phone call to one of them to make sure that Lee or Richard hadn’t just given away their phone to a stranger, extracting a promise that they’d keep sending the daily messages in the process.

Tomorrow morning, the message wouldn’t come, and they would know, but it wouldn’t be a surprise. Alternatively, the message _would_ come, like it had every other day, and Richard and Lee would continue on together until the day – somewhere in the indiscernible future – when they didn’t.

“I do want to. I just – I can’t believe it’s here. We’ve talked about it for so long, and now –”

“You’re overthinking it,” Lee told him, pressing a kiss to his forehead. “Come on, get those clothes off. Let me help you with those – mm – buttons. There we go.”

They spent another hour wrapped in each other’s comfortably familiar embrace, savouring every inch of skin, until Richard tucked Lee’s hair behind his ears with a determined little smile. “Come on, love.”

They clinked their glasses together – the last of the ludicrously expensive champagne they’d bought in France and had been saving for the most special of occasions – and swallowed in unison.

“D’you feel anything?”

“I feel like you’re the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me, and every day with you has been a gift, and I will never stop loving you – not in this lifetime, and not in any of those that follow.”

“Charming bastard,” Lee smiled, tugging him in for a long, lazy series of kisses.

He didn’t know what was coming next, what would happen when he finally succeeded after so many years – but what he did know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that he was not going to wake up (wouldn’t open his eyes to find the cold light of morning creeping across the room and a cold lifeless Richard in the bed next to him).

But something was definitely coming – of that, he was sure.

He could already feel it.

“You gave me _everything,_ and I love you – now, and forever,” he told Richard earnestly, letting him curl up on his chest, chin on Lee’s shoulder so he would feel each of his exhales as a puff of warm air on his upper lip.

“Forever,” Richard whispered back.

It wasn’t long after that that his eyes closed, and he didn’t say anything else.

“Wait for me,” Lee murmured, the words sluggish and struggling to roll over his tongue. His thoughts were growing hazier, his heart weaker, but still he didn’t lessen his grip on Richard, still warm and alive in his arms – for now, but not that much longer.

“Wait for me.”

It was like a very slow-acting anaesthetic. Through half-closed eyelids, he saw the hand squeezing Richard’s shoulder loosen and then fall away entirely.

Unconsciousness rushed towards him, and he welcomed it. Finally, he would reach that peaceful nirvana that he’d spent so many years of his life seeking.

Because after all this time, he’d found something to live for.

**Author's Note:**

> As we are rapidly establishing, even an idea for a little short story that I have one afternoon at work will morph into nearly 10k words... welp. Hopefully it didn't lurch around too much and it wasn't too grim and the ending was satisfactory (I've spent literally weeks tweaking it and am still not 100% sold but just had to post and get it over with!) Comments/feedback and kudos veeeery much appreciated :)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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